San Diego's East Village and SAA's LAGAR meeting

I'm in San Diego, California for Beyond Borders, the 76th annual meeting of the Society of American Archivists and will blog as much as I can during the next few days. 

I was initially dismayed to discover that the "bayfront" view from my room at the San Diego Hilton Bayfront features not only San Diego Bay and the San Diego-Coronado Bridge but also a massive Dole Food Company trucking facility, masses of railroad tracks, and a marine shipping terminal.  However, I find myself liking it more and more.  I find transportation infrastructure fascinating, and San Diego's deepwater harbor is its raison d'être.  Moreover, the Hilton -- San Diego's newest large hotel -- is adjacent a new Major League Baseball stadium, a new shopping mall, a convention center, and other recently built leisure facilities.  I would much rather look upon San Diego's unglamorous shipping facilities than upon a tourist fantasyland.

I had a little free time this morning, so I ventured into the city's East Village neighborhood in search of postage stamps and non-perishable breakfast food.  The East Village is the largest of San Diego's downtown neighborhoods -- it encompasses some 130 blocks -- and until recently was down on its luck.  Artists seeking modestly priced living and working space were drawn to the area, but many buildings were vacant and many social service agencies serving the homeless were also located there (sounds kind of like my neighborhood in Albany).

Completion of the new baseball stadium in 2004 led to redevelopment of much of the neighborhood, but it still retains something of its gritty character . . . and amidst all the new construction you occasionally find an older building that has survived.  This pair of structures located a stone's throw away from the intersection of 9th Avenue and E Street sits between two 21st-century apartment buildings.

The downtown branch of the U.S. Post Office, which spans E Street between 8th and 9th Avenues and is directly across the street from the Central Library branch of the San Diego Public Library, is another legacy.  It was built by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and opened in 1937.  I'm a sucker for Art Deco architecture, and I regret that I couldn't get a better picture of it; I simply wasn't up to standing in the middle of 8th Avenue or crossing 8th Avenue and dealing with the scary-looking guy who kept glowering at me as I took pictures.

The building features nine glazed terra-cotta panels that depict "The Transportation of the Mail." They were designed by Los Angeles sculptor Archibald Garner, who won a U.S. Department of the Treasury competition to create the facility's artwork and are tied together by a line of text:  "Through science and the toil of patient men thought traverses land and air and sea."

I'm particularly fond of the reliefs depicting air mail service . . .

. . . and marine transit of the mail.

Unlike many WPA-built Post Office facilities, the interior of San Diego's downtown Post Office doesn't feature any painted murals.  However, San Diego abounds in murals.  This mural decorates the 8th Avenue exterior of the restaurant Pokéz, which sits at the intersection of E Street and 8th Avenue.

And this mural depicting a group of musicians is located on a building just across 8th Avenue from Pokéz.

I headed back to the hotel to catch up on some work-related e-mail, attend the 2013 Program Committee meeting (yep, I'm helping to shape next year's annual meeting program), and meet with a Canadian colleague, and then I headed off to what for me is always an SAA highlight:  the meeting of the Lesbian and Gay Archives Roundtable (LAGAR).  LAGAR, which exists to promote archival documentation of LGBT people and communities and the interests of LGBT archivists, is one of SAA's most energetic and good-natured groups, and I always leave LAGAR meeting wishing that I could spend more time in the company of my fellow LAGAR members. 

I didn't get the chance to read the most recent issue of LAGAR's newsletter before heading to San Diego, so I was surprised -- and very pleasantly so -- to discover that pioneering lesbian historian Lillian Faderman was one of the featured speakers.  (The other featured speakers were representatives of the Lambda Archives San Diego, but I'm going to refrain from blogging about their presentation until after I visit the Lambda Archives this Saturday.)

Driven by the desire to help create something that was almost completely lacking when she came out in the 1950s -- a written history of LGBT people -- Faderman began researching women's romantic and sexual relationships as the gay rights movement began taking shape in the early 1970s.  Her talk contrasted the challenges she and other pioneering historians faced in the "bad old days" with the much changed situation that exists today.

Faderman learned quickly that one couldn't trust published sources.  Her research began with Emily Dickinson, who wrote forty poems that were obviously about a woman.  Faderman discovered that the woman in question was undoubtedly Susan Gilbert, who eventually married Dickinson's brother . . . and that Susan Gilbert Dickinson's daughter, who produced a book documenting the correspondence between the two women, exised many emotionally intense passages.  The letters were subsequently published in their entirety in a multi-volume collection of Dickinson's correspondence, but anyone seeking evidence of Dickinson's passionate attachment to another woman would have to wade through a ton of other letters.

Moreover, the archival profession hasn't always been particularly helpful. Harvard's Houghton Library holds the Dickinson-Gilbert letters, but neither the catalog record nor the finding aid describing this collection hint that scholars of LGBT history might be interested in them.  Other repositories have, for a variety of reasons, withheld materials:

• Fear of shocking donors or, in the case of colleges and universities, parents and alumni.  Anna Mary Wells, who was writing a biography of Mount Holyoke College president Mary Woolley, discovered a trove of love letters between Woolley and Mount Holyoke professor Jeanette Marks in an unprocessed collection held in the college's archives.  Marks preserved these letters, donated them to the college, placed no restrictions on access to them, and quite plainly knew that the letters would be interpreted -- and correctly so -- as evidence that she and Wooley were lesbians.  However, when Mount Holyoke president David Truman learned of Wells's discovery, he tried to suppress the letters and to bar Wells from quoting them in her book.  He backed down only after the American Historical Association, the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, and other scholarly groups protested, and Woolley's papers were eventually opened to "qualified researchers."

• Misguided desire to "protect" prominent people.  The Minnesota Historical Society holds the papers of Henry Whipple, the first Episcopal bishop of Minnesota, and his wife, Evangeline Simpson Whipple.  For years, the repository refused to process of make accessible one of the fourteen boxes in the collection -- the box that held the passionate correspondence between Evangeline Simpson Whipple and Rose Cleveland, the sister of U.S. President Grover Cleveland.  Evangeline Whipple Simpson deliberately preserved these letters, but the Minnesota Historical Society refused to make them accessible until historians began pressuring it to do so.  Fifty years after the letters were first accessioned, they were finally opened to researchers.

• Descendants' insistence.  When Jonathan Ned Katz, another pioneering historian of LGBT people, attempted to gain access to the emotionally intense correspondence between birth control activist Margaret Sanger and Dr. Marie Equi, Sanger's son barred him from doing so and asserted that only Sanger's activist career was of any interest to the public.

Noting that circumstances are quite different today, Faderman made an argument that I find quite sensible:  we need to have archives devoted to documenting the experiences of LGBT people and LGBT archivists planted in mainstream institutions.  Owing in no small part to "plants" who have gently educated their colleagues, Faderman can now readily find materials in mainstream libraries and archives, staff at these institutions can be counted upon to provide access to materials of interest to her, and finding aids often point her directly to collections of interest.  And as one of my fellow LAGARites pointed out, the process is reciprocal:  the existence of historians of LGBT people and communities enables archivists to make a compelling case for publicizing the existence of their LGBT holdings.

By the way, Faderman's own papers are held by the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives in Los Angeles, which has entered into a collecting partnership with the University of California at Los Angeles, which has begun digitizing them.

SAA 2009: LAGAR Annual Meeting

Jim Cartwright, my fellow co-chair, brought this beautiful lei made of orchids all the way from Hawaii and gave it to me immediately before the meeting started. I was and am deeply touched by this gesture, and for now I'm keeping the lei in the hotel room minibar. Does anyone have any advice on lei preservation?

The Lesbian and Gay Archives Roundtable met this afternoon. My tenure as co-chair ended when the business meeting concluded, and full details of the meeting will be reported in the official annual report that will go to SAA Council shortly. I'm just going to outline what I saw as the high points:

• Heidi Marshall (Columbia College Chicago) was elected to serve as co-chair for the 2009-2011 term. Congratulations, Heidi!

• Tom Hyry, our Council liaison, discussed Council's February 2009 revision of SAA's Equal Opportunity/Non-Discrimination Policy, which now explicitly includes both sexual orientation and gender identity/expression.
  

• LAGAR will convene a subcommittee to look at LAGAR's bylaws and leadership structure. Our current leadership structure, which involves having one male and one female co-chair serving staggered terms of office, made a lot of sense when LAGAR was created 21 years ago. However, it doesn't explicitly allow transpeople to serve as co-chairs, and it certainly freezes out genderqueer people who don't identify as either male or female. The committee will also look at ways LAGAR can make use of new technologies such as electronic voting. Any changes to the bylaws will be voted upon at the 2010 annual meeting.

• Paula Jabloner is looking for people to write short statements on Privacy and Confidentiality and Arrangement and Description for the Information for Community Archives manual and for someone to assume responsibility for the manual's ongoing editing, which requires periodic updating (revising the Electronic Records section is my first post-co-chair assignment). We also discussed the possiblity of working in tandem with other SAA groups to produce a general guide for all kinds of community archives.

• LAGAR is coming to Facebook! Keep your eyes peeled . . . .

After a brief break, we joined with the Women's Collections Roundtable for a panel discussion featuring Austin archivists and scholars who work with LGBT archival materials:

• Nikki Lynn Thomas of the Women and Gender Project at the University of Texas at San Antonio discussed the history of the collection and her repository's efforts to document women, gender expression, and sexual identity in South Texas.

• Kelly Kerbow-Hudson of the Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas at Austin highlighted three collections documenting the lives of LGBT Latino people: the Yolanda Alaniz Papers, the National Latino/a Lesbian and Gay Organization (LLEGÓ) Records, and the Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Papers. Anzaldúa's papers are the Benson Collection's most heavily used archival collection.

• Lisa Moore of the University of Texas at Austin's Department of English discussed her search for evidence of queerness in the lives of 18th century English women and noted that the archival evidence can be fugitive: the only public records that document same-sex relationships during this era concern criminal prosecutions, and lovers and relatives often destroyed private papers after creators' deaths. Moreover, even today there is a presumption of heterosexuality; scholars who uncover evidence of queerness are often accused of reading too much into their sources. As a result, researchers interested in locating a usable past of queerness might want to to publicize their archival finds without offering any detailed analysis of them.
  

During the question-and-answer session that followed, an interesting discussion of the meaning of the word "archive" took place: for many scholars, an "archive" is something assembled through research, while for archivists the term often refers to a corpus of materials produced by an organization as it carries out its functions and duties. There wasn't any resolution to this discussion, but it certainly highlighted the fact that we archivists don't have a monopoly on the word "archive."

LAGAR annual meeting, August 12, 4:15-6:30 PM

Littlefield Fountain, University of Texas at Austin, 8 October 2005.

The Society of American Archivists' Lesbian and Gay Archives Roundtable will meet on Wednesday, August 12 at the conference hotel. The business meeting will start at 4:15 PM, *ONE HOUR LATER* than the time listed in the SAA Annual Meeting program, and will wrap up at 5:15 PM. From 5:30-6:30 PM, we'll join the Women's Collections Roundtable for a joint panel discussion featuring scholars who work with women's and LGBT collections at local repositories.

At the business meeting, we'll elect a new male co-chair, add some new folks to the Steering Committee, talk about LAGAR's newsletter, and discuss ongoing projects such as our Information for Community Archives guide and new projects being planned for 2009-2010. We'll also recap some of the highlights of the past year.

See you in Austin!

SAA and its roundtables

Earlier this week, Russell over at Records Junkie put up a couple of posts concerning SAA roundtables and archival identity. I've been meaning to respond to these posts, but until now haven't really had the time needed to allow my own thoughts to take shape. I'm still trying to get everything to meld, so what follows might be a bit rough in spots . . . .

Russell's first post concerns, in part, the ways in which specific types of "identity" -- race/ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation -- act as an organizing principle for some roundtables. (FWIW, I happen to think all roundtables, sections, and SAA itself are all "identity" organizations -- joining SAA is a declaration of one's professional identity, and joining a section or roundtable is a way of declaring one's specific professional concerns and allegiances as well) It also highlights the lack of roundtables addressing other aspects of identity, most notably religion.

I understand Russell's point and will return to it in a bit, but I feel compelled to point out that the main goal of the "identity" roundtables is not to enable people who identify as X, Y, or Z to socialize/network for a couple of hours but to carry out some sort of professional activity. For example, the Lesbian and Gay Archives Roundtable (LAGAR), which I currently co-chair, works to promote the preservation and use of archival records documenting the lives and work of LGBT people and organizations. It also serves as a liaison between the archival profession and the many small, often volunteer-run LGBT archives established before the big research repositories began collecting LGBT materials. We've produced -- and periodically update -- a guide to LGBT records in North American repositories, and we're also in the final stages of creating a manual for small LGBT archives outlining the basics of identifying, preserving, describing, and providing access to LGBT records of enduring value. If LAGAR weren't doing this sort of documentary and outreach/educational work, I don't think that I would be nearly as committed to it.

I realize that the balance between socializing/networking and the sort of professional activity outlined above varies from roundtable to roundtable, and I'm inclined to allow newer roundtables a little time to find their footing; LAGAR celebrated its 20th anniversary this year, so we've had time to gel as a group and to get some work done. I also think that roundtables can contribute to SAA and the profession in any number of ways ways. For example, the Women Archivists Roundtable doesn't produce any guides to collections, but it does, among other things, coordinate the Navigator Program -- which is a substantial service to SAA.

Getting back to Russell's point about the lack of roundtables focusing upon religion, I suspect that the chief cause of this state of affairs is the existence of the Archivists of Religious Collections Section (ARCS). A lot of SAA members who work with such collections or who are otherwise interested in identifying, preserving, describing, or providing access to records documenting the role of religion in the lives of individuals or the history of religious institutions are most likely ARCS members. However, if other SAA members want to establish roundtables focusing on specific faiths or denominations and can articulate the distinctive contributions such roundtables would make to the organization or the profession, I would be more than happy to welcome them into the ranks.

Russell's second post concerns Council's recent decision to establish a 50-member minimum for roundtable membership and to abolish roundtables that fail to meet this minimum. Russell supports Council's decision, and rightly notes that it costs money to furnish meeting space for the roundtables. He also questions how effective a very small roundtable can be, and he has a point. However, I think there should be a place within SAA for roundtables that have less than 50 members provided that they actively meet the responsibilities outlined in the Council Handbook. Moreover, the 50-member limit threatens to obliterate the Latin American and Caribbean Cultural Heritage Archives Roundtable, which is less than a year old and serves a community traditionally underrepresented in SAA. How would dissolving this roundtable square with SAA's commitment to increasing diversity within the profession? It also looms over the Security Roundtable, which typically attracts archivists who are suddenly confronted by security issues. Do we want to abolish an organization that helps colleagues dealing with unexpected and often profoundly stressful professional challenges?

As far as the feasibility of allocating meeting space to very small groups is concerned, people can and often do attend meetings of roundtables to which they don't belong because they're curious about the group or interested in the meeting program. I check out various roundtables on occasion, and I know plenty of other SAA members who do the same. I also don't think that size is necessarily related to quality. Some of the best meetings -- and sessions -- I've ever attended have attracted a relatively small number of people, and I've sat through large meetings that just weren't worth my time. If SAA is concerned about the cost of meeting space, perhaps it should encourage roundtables to find alternate meeting space if feasible. For example, LAGAR met at the Gerber/Hart Library in 2007 and at the GLBT Historical Society in 2008, thus freeing up meeting space for other roundtables; however, we might need to meet at the conference hotel in 2009.

I suppose that what I find most troubling about the new roundtable membership requirement is that it suggests that SAA's recent membership increase -- a good thing -- might not be managed in ways that facilitate integration of new members into the organization or cultivate future leaders. Roundtables and sections are both charged with enabling new members actively to participate in SAA, but many section meetings are so big and thus so regimented that they can't do so effectively. I've been around for a while and am involved in a couple of multi-state grant projects, so I see lots of familiar faces when I walk into Electronic Records Section or Government Records Section meetings. However, if I were new to SAA, I would have little opportunity to get to know other members of these sections. Just about all of the time allotted for the ERS and GRS meetings is, by necessity, devoted to formal business meetings and programs, and the meetings attract so many people that we don't even have time to go around the room and introduce ourselves at the start of the meeting.

Roundtables, on the other hand, are generally small enough and informal enough to bring new members into the fold. For example, LAGAR meetings typically attract 30-40 people, and we always enable people to chat informally for 10-15 minutes before the meeting starts. The co-chairs and steering committee members consciously seek out first-time attendees and make them feel welcome, and I always make it a point to stop and ask how things are going when I see these new faces in the exhibit hall or session rooms in the days that follow. I want new SAA members to feel that their presence has been noted and appreciated, not simply lost in the crowd.

Roundtables also enable newer members to take on their first official leadership roles within SAA. Serving as a roundtable chair, co-chair, or steering commitee member is good practice for taking on similar roles within a section, and I know several former roundtable chairs who ultimately did so; others have become members of task forces or other SAA bodies. If SAA starts making it more difficult for roundtables to exist, it might ultimately decimate future leadership cohorts -- which isn't good for the organization or the profession at large.

Noting that SAA has publicized the meetings of unofficial groups such as the Progressive Archivists in its meeting programs, Russell advocates that, in addition to sections and roundtables, SAA establish official interest groups (e.g., Conservative Archivists, Catholic Archivists) that would receive a small amount of Web space but no official meeting space. I think that this is a good idea -- but I would personally prefer that the groups have at least some relationship to professional issues. One of the more tongue-in-cheek examples that Russell gives is Archivists Who Are Parents. If the main goal of Archivists Who Are Parents is to enable members to discuss the challenges of and brainstorm strategies for balancing work, involvement in professional associations, and parenting, great. If its chief aim is to allow archivists to exchange information about the best diapers, dealing with the terrible twos/teens, etc., it should, in my view, remain unofficial.

Official interest groups would certainly help to draw new members into the life of SAA and allow archivists who share common interests but do not wish to undertake formal projects to discuss issues of common concern. Moreover, such groups might help to reduce some of the fiscal burden associated with finding meeting space: Russell notes that some of the smaller roundtables might prefer to reconstitute themselves as interest groups, and I suspect that he might be right (of course, some interest groups may ultimately decide to become roundtables, so resource demands might remain unchanged).

I would strongly oppose any effort to convert all roundtables, which have formal reporting requirements and other responsibilities, to interest groups. Again, it's a matter of developing leadership: the experience of completing and filing convener statements and annual reports, complying with SAA's records management policy and transferring records to the SAA Archives as appropriate, putting together annual meeting programs and running roundtable business meetings, and carrying out roundtable-specific projects is good preparation for other leadership roles. Interest groups, even officially sanctioned ones, won't be as closely attuned to SAA's inner workings, and their conveners won't have the same level of experience as roundtable chairs/co-chairs. It's in SAA's long-term interest to cultivate as many potential leaders as possible, and eliminating or starving roundtables will almost certainly reduce the candidate pool or make the learning curve for new section and task force leaders even steeper than it is at present.

I've gone on long enough, upstate New York is enjoying a brief lull between snowstorms, and I have some errands to run. However, before I sign off, a couple of disclaimers:

• Russell, we've never actually met, and I apologize if you find my use of your given name overly familiar; this "brave new world of digital intimacy" is a bit much at times.
• My statements are mine alone and do not necessarily represent those of LAGAR's other co-chair, the LAGAR Steering Committee, or the LAGAR membership.

SAA: LAGAR meeting

Today was a work day. I spent the morning doing some stuff that I didn't have the chance to finish before leaving for San Francisco and the afternoon helping to run the annual meeting of the Lesbian and Gay Archives Roundtable (LAGAR) of the Society of American Archivists (SAA).

As usual, we met away from the conference hotel and at a local LGBT Archives. The Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society, which is located a few blocks away from the conference hotel, was an incredibly gracious host, and we all appreciated being able to see its exhibits on the Folsom Street Fair and GLBT people who served in the military from World War II to the Iraq War.

The meeting followed its usual format, which meant that we had a little time to socialize, then introduced ourselves, and got down to the business of electing a new male co-chair. Congrats go to (newlywed!) Jim Cartwright, who was just elected, and profound thanks go to Steve Novak, who just stepped down.

We then listened to reports concerning LAGAR's newsletter, Web site, online manual for community-based archivists who lack library/archives/information science backgrounds and revised our bylaws so that they conform to recent changes in SAA regulations concerning roundtable leadership; SAA now mandates that roundtable chairs serve no more than two consecutive years.

In addition, we got an update from Ben Primer, who just finished his term as SAA Council liaison and let us know that Council is planning on phasing out every roundtable that has less than fifty official members (i.e., dues-paying SAA members who indicate on their membership renewal forms that wish to be a member of the roundtable). To make matters worse, SAA now allows each member to join only two roundtables; at one point, one could join as many roundtables as one wanted.

LAGAR currently has fewer than fifty official members, but our bylaws allow non-SAA members to join our roundtable: we try very hard to bridge the gap between archivists who have academic credentials and professional positions and the community-based practitioners who began preserving LGBT archival materials long before research repositories took an interest in LGBT history. We also have some SAA dues-paying members who haven't indicated on their renewal forms that they wish to be official LAGAR members.

What a mess. I understand that roundtables consume a certain amount of SAA's resources and that there are a few roundtables that are not particularly well-run, but this policy is a disaster in the making. SAA has gotten so big during the past few years, and it's hard for newbies to get to know one another. Roundtables, which tend to be small, allow people to get to know one another and to take on their first SAA leadership roles.

Moreover, SAA is currently trying to promote diversity within the profession. Its new roundtable policy, which will likely have a negative impact not only upon LAGAR but also upon the Archivists and Archives of Color Roundtable, the Latin American and Caribbean Cultural Heritage Roundtable, and other roundtables that seek to make this profession more inclusive, isn't going to do much to make SAA more diverse.

No one at the meeting was happy about this new policy. In the coming weeks, LAGAR's Steering Committee is going to have to figure out how to respond to Council's directive. We discussed a few ideas at the meeting, but we need to flesh them out.

LAGAR was founded in 1988, and in honor of our anniversary, we then moved on to an informal panel discussion on LGBT archives. Ron Grantz of the Lavender Library, Archives and Cultural Exchange of Sacramento, Karen Sundheim of the San Francisco Public Library's Hormel Gay and Lesbian Center, and Greg Williams of the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives talked about their repositories' history and holdings.

I wish we had had more time (I always wish that), but I'm glad for the time that we did have. Everyone had lots of great stories about their holdings (Ron Grantz's story about the papers of Jerry Sloan, a gay ex-minister who won a legal battle against Jerry Falwell, was particularly delightful), and it's apparent, at least to me, that those of us seeking to document LGBT history face some challenges that didn't exist twenty years ago:

• As Greg Williams so aptly put it, a lot of community-based LGBT archives (i.e., archives that were started by LGBT activists and are not affiliated with academic institutions or other research entities) have gotten too big to manage properly or to die a peaceful death. What's going to happen to these archives when the current generation of community-based archivists passes from the scene? Will they simply be absorbed by research institutions? If so, what will it mean for LGBT people?
• Staffing, funding, and space are real concerns for everyone. However, as Steve Novak noted, these are concerns that all kinds of community-based archives (i.e., local historical societies) face. The fact that we've encountered them is in some ways a sign that we've joined the archival mainstream.
• Lots of people at the meeting expressed a need for a national network of LGBT archives and archivists. LAGAR has a guide to repositories holding LGBT materials on its Web site and encourages non-SAA members to join, but it's plain that the need is greater. Just how much LAGAR, an all-volunteer organization, can do to build such a network isn't clear, but the Steering Committee needs to do some brainstorming.

Thanks to Ron, Karen, and Greg for being such great panelists!